Back in high school, when I fancied myself an intellectual, I realized I could endear myself to my English teachers (objectively to be regarded as ‘cool’, after all) by embracing my emotional sloppiness and erratic curiosities by writing. Writing earned me an admission ticket to an elite club—the English department office—and they ate their lunch, shit with a lot of sprouts on it—in a big, glass-walled room overflowing with books.

I cleverly whipped up half-baked poetry and prose, moving, as they did, from unit to unit. And as they tossed about names like Yeats, Borroughs, and Williams—I would leave lunch with a steno pad full of references to check. One of my dumber ideas was roping my entire high school in to the farce that was my foray in to playwriting. Having a penchant for style over substance, I slickly set the pages in a Courrier font and titled my 30 pages of drivel, Pharmakon, from the greek word for “poison” and “cure”. Death and life in one! I am so fucking brilliant!

Of course, the word nor its meanings were mine. I was simply carpet-bagging both under the guise of loftiness. My Pharmakon, a short play inside a cancer hospital was heavy on the “poison” and not so on the “cure”. It died that spring, but I still felt an odd possessiveness when I found a book in Champaign, Illinois that just debuted called—well, you guessed it. Seeing that book there, it looked great. And I’ll read it, I really will. And when I do, it will clearly be accompanied by the pangs of wist about my high school days, how incredibly supercilious I was, and how much I hid under other people’s brilliance.

I can’t suggest to be free from the shackles of such insecurity—the visual here is my true self as the Nicorette box that magically cuts the chains—but if that damned title was to mean anything, if it’s to actually be ‘poison’ and ‘cure’, well, then it provides, in moments like today, 2009 in Illinois, permission to be honest and self-aware. All that from a book I haven’t even read.